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Nicole Kidman as she was, left in a May, 18 1992 photo, and a more recent look from May 19, 2013 in Cannes, France.

Nicole Kidman and I have a lot in common. Not, unfortunately, the multimillionaire earnings, the jet-set lifestyle and Oscar-winning acting skills. But we both chose the same name (Faith) for one of our daughters. And we both have naturally curly hair – not that either our photo albums betray this.

This week, however, Kidman has revealed that after 40 years of loathing her hair, she is finally learning to love her barnet and embrace the curl. “I almost never straighten it any more; I let it go curly and wild,” she told InStyle magazine.

To which I can only snort, and reply (in the words of author Mary Ann Shaffer): “Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don’t you ever let anyone tell you different.”

To be fair, I haven’t had curls for as long as Kidman, who sported wonderful auburn ringlets in the late 1980s, before swapping to a blonde ironed-out mane. In fact, until the age of 13, I had an unexceptional straight bob with the odd wave or two. Then I experimented, getting my hair cut into layers – and the result was a disastrous corkscrew curl mullet that I’ve never totally escaped.

My grandmother, who had prayed for curly hair every night as a child, was in raptures. My classmates promptly christened me Larry the Lamb, a nickname it took an age to live down. On the plus side, no one of the opposite sex looked at me for years, so it gave me plenty of time to sit in my bedroom miserably revising for exams.

But my hair was an education in itself. Until I had curls, I had no idea that hair could grow outwards before it grew long; that the innocent act of falling asleep can wreck a perfect style; that I could end up with so much flammable product on my head that, for public safety, I should have also been lugging around a fire extinguisher. Or that, despite such effort, I might delude myself that I had gorgeous pre-Raphaelite tresses – only to catch a glimpse in a shop window and realise I was really channelling mid-career Meatloaf.

For those who have perfectly straight locks, the idea that a biological polymer made up of 10 per cent water and 90 per cent protein can have such an impact on your life seems made-up and frivolous. But the world is divided into two types of people: those who think they understand what a bad hair day is – and those who have curly hair and know.

The knotty question most curly girls have asked themselves at some point is: how can you control your life when you can’t even control your hair? After all, hair is a key aspect of how we present ourselves to the world, a part of us that is always on view. It pervades our fairytales, our myths and our history – Rapunzel, Samson, even Julius Caesar, who was famously touchy about his receding hairline. As Melanie Griffiths sums it up in the 1988 film Working Girl: “You wanna be taken seriously; you have to have serious hair.”

Griffiths’ line is far from fiction. When I worked as a health correspondent for the BBC’s news channel, I was gently taken aside with the suggestion I should straighten my hair to look more authoritative on screen. Don’t believe me? Well, next time you watch the news, count how many girls with curls you actually see.

Luckily this career move coincided with (thank goodness) the invention of affordable curling irons, which allowed me to look relatively groomed, and even achieve a fringe for the first time in years.

I did return to curls for my wedding day (mainly because I was worried that any humidity could end up with me resembling Monica from Friends’s notorious look in that episode set in Barbados) – and I have flirted with waves and ringlets since then. But my belief in the straight and narrow has only really been shaken by Kidman’s claim yesterday that becoming a mother has led her to embrace her curls.

Kidman says – although I’ve yet to see sound photographic evidence of this – that she’s now wearing her hair au naturel because her younger daughter Faith has similar hair.

Mine, in contrast, had baby curls when young, but now have straight hair. Still, what kind of message am I giving if the family joke is that, in the case of fire, after the children, my GHD straighteners are the things I’d grab?

I’ve wrestled with this conundrum and can only advise the next generation thus: do whatever you want with your hair – in my eyes, you’ll always be beautiful. Just think carefully before cutting in layers. Or at least make sure you’ve won an Oscar, and can afford the on-call celebrity stylist.

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